


Know the Melody, Hear It Rhyme

by mercuryhatter



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Kid Fic, M/M, Married Couple, Post-Canon, Pregnancy, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens), Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-29 04:39:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18771373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuryhatter/pseuds/mercuryhatter
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley have retired, married, to the South Downs, and the life agrees with them perfectly. Aziraphale decides he'd like to take another step in it.





	Know the Melody, Hear It Rhyme

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "The Mother" by Brandi Carlile
> 
>  _Welcome to the end of being alone inside your mind_  
>  You're tethered to another and you're worried all the time  
> You always knew the melody but you never heard it rhyme 
> 
> I'm too lazy to format footnotes sue me

Aziraphale was thinking about something. Crowley could practically feel the heat generated by the gears turning in his head, had been able to for months now. He was thinking about something and thinking about it _hard_ , in the particular way Aziraphale sometimes did. He tended to make significant decisions one of two ways: either by doing it immediately, impulsively, with the surety of divinity and not a single second thought, or by thinking about it very very hard for a long period of time until he got such a headache that he could no longer put the decision off.[1]

 

[1: Crowley assumed this was how the second method tended to end, anyway.]

 

There was no point interrupting him before he was done, it only slowed down the process. And lately Crowley was feeling very relaxed about the whole _t_ _ime_ business, and how it marches on. The apocalypse was ten years behind them, they had been settled deeply into their quiet life in the South Downs for five of those years, and Crowley had the delicate ruby-studded ring on his left hand as a comforting weight whenever he thought the world might spin out from under him again.[2]

 

[2: It had been a quiet ceremony, attended only by the two of them. Or it had begun as a quiet ceremony, anyway, an awed hush blanketing the both of them as they exchanged rings between the vibrations of the stars above and the hum of the sea below. Then they had broken into the several bottles of champagne they had brought for the occasion, and it was significantly less quiet for the rest of the night.]

 

So Crowley tended his garden, and he learned to make jam and cobbler and apple pie like humans do, and he let Aziraphale think. This trailed on for more than a year. Sometimes Crowley almost forgot that he was waiting on something, and then he would feel Aziraphale in his library grinding away on whatever it was he was considering, and he would smile to himself a little bit and continue to wait.

 

On a chilly night in March, when Crowley was curled entirely under the covers of their rather extravagant bed, his head tucked into Aziraphale’s warm chest and legs tangled between his thighs, he felt the moment Aziraphale came to a decision and poked his head out from under the covers expectantly.

 

“Well?” he asked. Aziraphale flushed, embarrassed at being caught.

 

“Well what?” he responded primly. Crowley stuck his tongue out and resettled himself on Aziraphale’s shoulder.

 

“You’ve been thinking for some time now,” he said. “I’ve been waiting to hear about whatever it is. I know when you do these things, angel.”

 

“Well, you don’t have to be so smug about it,” Aziraphale huffed, without heat. “Yes, I have been thinking.”

 

“You can tell me now, or wait until you’re ready,” Crowley said, arching into a yawn. “I’m in no rush.”

 

Aziraphale smiled softly into the pouf of Crowley’s hair that brushed his chin from where the demon was curled into his shoulder. Retirement had mellowed him so, it was lovely to watch. He still tended towards the high-strung, of course, and Aziraphale could still see it sometimes when he felt unsteady or panicked. But Crowley knew how to rein himself back in, and it happened less and less these days. Other things about him had relaxed, too: without a working demon’s image to keep up, his clothes grew softer-- never less fashionable, but less like a human pretending to be James Bond and more like whatever Crowley thought he might really like to wear that day. He grew his hair out and occasionally twined it into braids or wore it piled on the crown of his head. He indulged in a bit of eyeliner or lip gloss, relaxing into the femininity that the 20th century had tried to push out of men’s fashion. He even spoke kindly to his plants every now and again, when one of them had bloomed excessively well or when one was struggling to successfully mature.[3]

 

[3: Only rarely, you understand, and only because sometimes it helped them grow better than a harsh word. Entirely selfish.]

 

Crowley’s calm had helped Aziraphale come to the decision he’d been chewing over for so long. That, and the way he interacted with children when they went into town, teaching them harmless pranks or producing bugs or amphibians out of nowhere for them to admire. Crowley had always enjoyed children, of course; they were natural forces of chaos and required very little work on Crowley’s part to satisfy his innate desire for mischief. This was a tendency of his that had factored heavily into Aziraphale’s considerations over the past year, and he had made a study of it in the meantime.

 

“I’m ready now,” Aziraphale decided, then prodded Crowley under the chin to make his half lidded eyes open. “Pay attention, please.”

 

“I am,” Crowley grumbled; seeing the serious quirk of Aziraphale’s eyebrows, he sat up. “I am,” he repeated, sincerely this time. Aziraphale nodded.

 

“I’ve been thinking, and I’ve decided we should have a child,” he said.

 

Crowley’s eyes lit up, then dimmed with consternation, then flashed through thoughtful, worried, and elated in very quick succession. Aziraphale watched them fondly.

 

“Yeah, all right,” he said finally. “All right, angel.” He laughed a little, catching it behind one hand. “Tell me how.”

 

“I’d like to carry,” Aziraphale said, “if that’s all right with you. I’ve been researching to form my best guesses about what the child might be like, based on all that nephilim business. As far as I can tell no one has tried this particular arrangement before, but they should be largely like us. They just can’t get discorporated, of course; I have no idea where they would go and I certainly don’t see Upstairs _or_ Down handing us a new body for our… rather unorthodox child.”

 

“No, probably not,” Crowley said, his half-hidden smile dimming a little as he considered Heaven and Hell. “Do you think they’ll give us trouble? They’d have to know, wouldn’t they?”

 

“We certainly won’t be the ones to tell them,” Aziraphale said firmly. “But yes, I imagine they will probably find out.”

 

“And you have a plan for that?”

 

“Tell them to fuck off,” Aziraphale said. Crowley snorted. “No, really, dear. We did it once already, and they haven’t wanted anything to do with us since. If they  _do_ come investigating, we tell them we don’t work for them anymore and they can fuck directly off.”

 

“And if they don’t?”

 

Aziraphale sighed, wrapping his arms more securely around Crowley.

 

“That is a point of uncertainty, yes. I would fight for us, of course. I would do it for what we have now just as fiercely as I would do it if it were to come to that later. And--”

 

“And I would too, of course,” Crowley murmured, finding Aziraphale’s hand and squeezing it tightly.

 

“Right. So that’s settled,” Aziraphale continued on a heavy sigh of breath. “So, if you like, we could get started any time. Now, even, if you’re ready, but please do take your time to think about it if you need to.”

 

“So I would be…” Crowley made a series of vague gestures that would have been completely incomprehensible without context and 6,000 years of friendship. Aziraphale rolled his eyes fondly.

 

“Yes, dear, I would manifest a vulva and uterus and all the other internal mechanisms necessary, and you would provide the seed.”

 

“Right,” Crowley said, flushing slightly. “I mean, yeah, of course. It’s just, I usually go my own direction, you know.”

 

“I know. And I don’t want you to do anything you’re uncomfortable with, of course. There are other ways.” Aziraphale traced his hands over the scars on Crowley’s chest, the slight outward curve of his hips. He didn’t need either; he could have been shaped any way he chose, and over the years had inhabited many different bodies. But he had always been slowly bending toward this one, his favorite shape. It generated the hormones he liked best without a human doctor’s help and he hadn’t  _really_ gotten the surgery that would produce the scars he wore-- he didn’t have near enough trust in human medicine for that. It was more of a mark that he had claimed this body Hell had given him, taken it for his own and bent it away from what Hell would have him do with it. He and Aziraphale had experimented with many genital configurations over the years, but Crowley had quickly settled on a favorite that he now rarely deviated from: a lovely[4] vulva with a small penis nestled at the top, something similar to what human surgeons had begun to create in the previous century with a procedure they called a metoidioplasty. The two of them rarely used it for penetration, and even then it wouldn’t produce the type of seed Aziraphale would need without rather more effort than either of them had previously attempted to make.

 

[4: In Aziraphale’s somewhat biased opinion.]

 

“You wouldn’t… not with someone else?” Crowley asked, wrinkling his nose.

 

“Goodness, no, my dear, not the typical way.”

 

“Good,” Crowley said. “I don’t think-- not any other way, either. What I mean is, I’d like it to be me.”

 

“Good,” Aziraphale murmured, pressing a kiss to the arch of Crowley’s nose. Crowley’s eyes fluttered shut under the touch. “I’d like it to be you, too.”

 

“Good.” The word was barely a brush of breath against Aziraphale’s cheek, more felt than heard. “Then I’d like to sleep on it. And on you, if you haven’t got more reading to do,” he said, opening one eye to grin cheekily.

 

“I will allow myself to be tempted into a nap, yes, fine,” Aziraphale declared with all the drama of a rather bad Shakespearean player. He tossed himself back onto the pillows and allowed Crowley to slither on top of him, tucking his head under Aziraphale’s chin. Aziraphale relaxed under the weight, feeling their hearts tap rhythmically against each other.

 

“Pull the covers up, angel, ‘s bloody cold,” was muttered irritably into his chest several minutes later. Aziraphale huffed, but complied, burying Crowley’s head beneath the comforter and settling in to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> now with a translation into Russian! https://archiveofourown.org/works/20309923/chapters/48148549


End file.
